Bharti Airtel Ltd. said Thursday it has joined hands with artificial-intelligence search start-up Perplexity AI to give all of the telecom operator’s roughly 360 million mobile, broadband and direct-to-home customers a complimentary year-long subscription to Perplexity Pro. The premium tier, normally priced at about ₹17,000 ($200) a year, or $20 a month, can be redeemed through the Airtel Thanks app. Vice-Chairman and Managing Director Gopal Vittal described the arrangement as the first generative-AI partnership of its kind by an Indian carrier, adding that it would place “powerful, real-time knowledge tools” in the hands of millions at no extra cost. Perplexity co-founder and Chief Executive Aravind Srinivas said the deal broadens access to professional-grade AI for students, professionals and households across the country. Perplexity Pro unlocks higher usage limits—up to hundreds of AI-powered searches a day—along with access to advanced language models such as GPT-4.1 and Claude, document upload and analysis, and image generation via the new Labs feature. Airtel’s move follows Google’s offer of free Gemini subscriptions to Indian students and comes as the carrier seeks to narrow the subscriber gap with Reliance Jio. For San Francisco-based Perplexity, India has become one of its top four markets by daily traffic, and the Airtel collaboration is its first with an Indian telecom operator after similar tie-ups with SoftBank and T-Mobile overseas.